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Terry Childs Found Guilty
A jury in San Francisco found Terry Childs guilty of one felony count of computer tampering. The trial lasted four months. Childs now faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
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Democracy is a form of government that ensures we are governed as well as we deserve.
Fuck off. He followed the fucking city policy, maybe he was a jerk about it, but that doesn't make you right about him.
As stupid as it is, its the law. He has an obligation to follow the law, not a moral technical compass. If there is a problem with the law then it needs to be changed not broken. You are your technical vigilantes need to be stopped from taking technology into your own hands.
How exactly was he breaking the law? As I understand it, the whole issue wasn't that he tampered with anything. Instead, he refused to disclose the passwords when the person requesting them did not follow proper protocols.
Charming man. I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one. -Arthur Dent
Let's say he was hit by a bus, killed, and consequently unable to disclose the password. Would he be guilty of computer tampering in that case? How about the bus driver?
Yes. Security rightly assumes that the weakest link of any computer/information protection is the humans. He followed their policy about how to deal with people trying to get access, no matter where or how powerful those people were.
He should be commended, not disgraced.
This guy was in the employ of the city government, which necessarily acts differently than a corp, which makes your analogy false. His direct bosses don't make the rules, the elected officials do. The difference is crucial. Furthermore, his following the rules was not to the detriment of the city.
There is just no way around it, no matter how big a douche your employer is, or how wrong or unfair you think it is, or how big a mistake they are making... withholding your employers' passwords will land you in jail.
Some may work up some emotion over this, but I don't think this will really be a surprise to many people.
Here's a hint; when you end up in a room with the cops and a lot of your management, fine, ask for your lawyer, but don't plan on using that same management's written policy against them. They are management - they wrote the policy. They're telling you their new policy. Verbally. In no uncertain terms. With the cops present.
You cannot lock your customers out of their equipment. This is not a legal theory our society will ever adopt, nor should it. Imagine if the courts agreed that IT staff has discretion to withhold their customers' own passwords. "They weren't smart enough to have it." "They asked for it the wrong way." "They once had a written policy that I shouldn't tell them."
OK, so no one can ever fire you. When can't you come up with an excuse to lock the equipment and walk off? Imagine if the courts blessed it! You could pull that burn off and coast, untouchable. Yeah, that philosophy really has legs.
You: "Give me the password."
Your employee: "No."
You: "You're violating my policy - I need the password."
Your employee: "I disagree. I have my own interpretation of your policy."
You: "You're fired."
Your former employee: "Great, now I definitely won't give you the password."
You: "Obviously I'm not paying you to refuse to do what I'm asking. But you still have my passwords."
Your former employee: "Fine, but since you're not paying me, I'm not your slave. You can't force me to perform."
Hear that sound? It's the eyes of every slave who ever lived rolling back in their heads.
Think about it. Childs could, if he truly was motivated by fear of violating a policy, have called his lawyer into the room, to say: "no problem, we'll give you the passwords, we just need you to release us from liability for disclosing those passwords, one pager, sign here..." He didn't, because this was about ego, not policy. He just didn't want to have to cave and do what they said. He's not the first - many an outsized ego has landed its owner in prison.
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There was no "only give to the mayor" rule, but there were "don't tell your boss the password" and "don't say it in front of other people" rules
Fuck off
Hear, hear. Just because the guy is a nerd doesn't mean we have to rally 'round him.
Right. I saw it happening a lot here after Hans Reiser killed his wife. It was pretty damn obvious he did it, but he sure had a lot of otherwise intelligent slashdotters refusing to face facts.
It's a valuble lesson; intelligent people are no more immune to self-deception. They might even be better at it.
I think the problem people have, is that the court should never have been involved at all. Okay... so he's insubordinate and fired. No problem.
AFTER he's fired, they go to him and STILL want him to do part of his job (disclose the passwords). Tough cookies. The deal in employment is "payment received for services rendered". Once he's fired, he is not receiving payment from the city. So he's under no obligation whatsoever to render services.
You can make a case that he was insubordinate and deserved to be fired. But once he *was* fired, he was entirely in the right to tell the city to FOAD. And the court should have told the city to FOAD as well.
Imagine all the people...
Jury nullification consists precisely in ignoring that particular instruction: that you should only apply the law and not judge the law itself. Duh. This notwithstanding, if you say you agreed with the law, and thought it had broken it, well, then, obviously you did the right (moral) thing and have a lot more info on the case than random slashdotters. Well done.
As an American, I am profoundly depressed by this thread. I respect the juror who is posting his perspective here, and greatly appreciate the fact he's taking the time to explain what happened from an insider's perspective. But his account reveals a terrible devolution of our system of justice: the ordinary citizens on a jury no longer protect us against an inappropriate or unfair application of the law.
It makes me furious every time I hear a juror come out of the jury room and say "I don't think he really did anything bad, but according to the judge's instructions, I had no choice but to convict." No, you had a choice. The brilliantly cynical and untrusting rebels who wrote the Constitution put you there to make the choice. Not an unfeeling robotic choice, not a judge-directed decision, but an independent decision that truly reflects the informed judgment of a "jury of peers."
The jury has become, not an independent check against the juggernaut of government prosecution, but a mere puppet of the system. In such a legal system, any one of us can be sent to jail for life on the government's whim, because there's not one of us who doesn't -- knowingly or unknowingly -- violate several laws daily; we count on juries to say, when appropriate, "ok, maybe he technically violated the law, but this prosecution is unreasonable, and we're not going along with it."
Our system was designed to make it really, really hard to convict. And really easy to acquit. If the prosecutor doesn't like the case, he can toss it out. If the judge doesn't like the case, he can toss it out. Heck, if the judge doesn't like the jury's "guilty" verdict, he can toss it out (but he can't set aside a "not guilty" verdict). Why has the jury come to believe they can't exercise at least the same power as the prosecutors and the judge routinely do: the power to toss out a case that just ain't right?